Making sense of planning expertise: housing policy and the role of experts in the Programa Especial de Realojamento (PER)

Author: Simone Tulumello

The first issue of the new Radical Housing Journal includes a “conversation” featuring, among the authors, exPERts team member Roberto Falanga, Simone Tulumello and Ana Rita Alves – together with Rita Silva, Jannuis Kühne, Andy Inch and Sílvia Jorge.

Abstract:

The Caravana pelo Direito à Habitação travelled across Portugal together with local groups and associations to collect information on and give visibility to housing needs, while aiming to create new networks and influence the national political agenda. This conversation brings together seven scholar-activists that participated in the Caravana, who reflect upon the Caravana and contemporary struggles on the right to housing in Portugal. The conversation sheds light on some contentious issues that are presented through a selection of relevant excerpts, which cover personal identities as scholar-activists; contexts shaping contemporary housing struggles; and the relation of the Caravana to the the politics of housing in Portugal.

This chapter provides an overview of the field of housing politics in contemporary Lisbon: the transition from the end of a period of economic crisis and deep austerity to a fast economic growth based on exportation, tourism and real estate; the intersection of historical housing problems with new trends of financialisation, touristification and gentrification; and the growth of social movements concerned with the right to housing and to the city.
By reflecting on housing crisis and struggles, the chapter takes two conceptual steps. On the one hand, by building on an understanding of austerity as the downloading of vulnerability to risk
from the economic to the social sphere, it explores the entrenchment of austerity in the field of housing. On the other hand, by questioning the capacity of emerging social movements to fight
the social vulnerability brought by austerity, it questions social movements’ potential to establish themselves as a ‘resilient’ alternative to the dominant models of economic development.

Recent European comparative studies in the fields of housing policy and spatial planning have been dominated by taxonomical and linear approaches, and by normative calls for convergence toward systems considered more ‘mature’ or ‘advanced’. In this article, we adopt a genealogical perspective and consider those cultures that are central to the shaping of policy. We set out a long-term exploration of the intersection between spatial planning and housing policy in Portugal and focus on the Special Programme for Rehousing (Programa Especial de Realojamento, PER), a programme that has had changing roles (from a financial instrument to a core component of policies of urban regeneration) in connection with political and planning cultures changing in time and space. In this way, we provide evidence of the limited capacity of taxonomic and linear approaches to describe planning and housing systems undergoing processes of change and, conversely, show the potential of genealogical research.